Friday, May 18, 2012

Oops - Someone Stole Our 800-Year-Old Tree

The Lorax would be infuriated! I know I am! How the heck did someone manage to "steal" a giant red cedar tree from a Canadian Provincial Park on Vancouver Island? It was easy, say both environmental groups as well as park rangers - someone just drove into a parking lot, chopped it down partially, let the rangers finish it, then came back and dragged the rest of it away. The B.C. government should look into these lame excuses, which just don't "cut it" for me. According to the video below, the old-growth forest in Carmanah-Walbran Provincial Park has been protected since 1988. So someone is obviously looking the other way while loggers ravage these giant trees, and there's absolutely no excuse that can justify this .

Torrance Coste of the Wilderness Committee said consistent budget cuts over the last decade mean park rangers rarely monitor remote sites such as the Carmanah-Walbran Provincial Park, from where the cedar was chopped.

"Whoever's doing this knows that no one's going to have eyes on this park for months at a time so it's exceptionally easy to do what they've done," Coste said Thursday.

Don Closson, who supervises the Cowichan area for B.C. Parks, said Parks officials at the site a year ago noticed that about 80 per cent of the tree had been cut through and that a professional faller was hired to bring it down because it posed a safety hazard.

"On our return this year we noticed that somebody had gone in and cut up a large portion of the butt and dragged portions of it into the parking lot," he said.

Blocks of red cedar are valuable as a roofing product, Closson said, adding officials have little information in the case.
"We have no eyewitnesses or licence plates at this time."